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<b>Quake update and RAVE issues

<b>Quake update and RAVE issues

CNET staff
2 min read
Regarding previously reported problems with Quake and RAVE, MacSoft has posted a Quake update (v. 1.08.3). As noted by Sean Smith, it fixes issues such as "lighting in the game and video freezing upon quit." Gavin MacElwee writes that MacSoft told him that the update would also fix the RAVE issue "as well as a bunch of problems with the 3dfx hardware and IPX problems." However, based on the reports that follow here, it seems unlikely that it will help the RAVE issue much:

Mike Breeden's excellent Accelerate Your Mac! web site writes that: "From what I've seen the Rage II just does not have the horsepower to run RAVE Quake at 640x480 at a decent framerate. RAVE Quake does run well on the right card - as I've tested it with the RagePro chip based card from ATI (I have a pre-production RagePro SGram version) and was very surprised at both the quality of the images and the speed." The results are on his site.

Mike also adds: "Lots of Power computing owners have also written me stating that they cannot get RAVE to recognize their ATI chip as a 3D accelerator." I have gotten similar confirmation of this. For example Peter Centgraf writes: "I use a PowerBase 180 (with built-in Rage II also) and the ATI 3D Accelerator 3.3f7 extension. I get a 'There was an error initializing the RAVE card' message when starting Quake RAVE and then it quits."

Finally, Matthew Haffner provides still more Quake/RAVE background: "There are three versions of the Quake application included by MacSoft. The basic application renders the 3D scenery through software and works great with all video options. However, two hardware rendering versions are also included for RAVE and 3Dfx hardware. These applications employ a completely different rendering scheme and produce fantastic looking 3D scenery. The 'problem' your reader notes afflicts all ATI RAGE II chipset based video solutions including the XCLAIM 3D & VR cards, PM 6500, and Power Computing machines when using the RAVE-specific application only. The 'problem' is really just an extremely low framerate. Although there has been some discussion on comp.sys.mac.games.action that a driver update may help, most bottom line conclusions are that this chipset is not up to the task of the GL version of Quake. I have a web page that summarizes framerate results from Macintosh Quake players."